


Everything Is Awful: The Film Critiques of James Buchanan Barnes

by osprey_archer



Series: Reciprocity Extras [8]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2018-10-23 08:43:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10716054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: Bucky rants about movies to anyone who will listen.





	1. Mad Max

“We’d run our own city-state after the apocalypse went down,” Bucky says.

Steve lifts his head from the couch arm. The credits have rolled, and the DVD of _Mad Max: Fury Road_ has looped back to the main menu. “Yeah?” he says.

“ _Yeah_ we would,” Bucky says. He sounds like he’s relishing the prospect. “Only we wouldn’t do it like Immortan Joe. You’d probably insist on letting people vote and shit.” 

“Probably,” Steve agrees.

“At least till they voted for something you thought was shitty. Then you’d be a fucking tyrant,” Bucky adds. He smiles with relish at the look of discomfort growing on Steve’s face. It feels too true. 

“Maybe I’m not cut out to lead a city-state,” Steve says.

“You’d keep the bad guys out. That’s all anybody cares about after an apocalypse,” Bucky says. He swivels around, so he’s lying with his legs over the back of the couch. “Tony’d have his own fucking island,” he muses. “Well, Pepper would actually run the damn thing, but Tony would be the muscle.” Bucky stretches his arms above his head, so his knuckles brush the carpet. “Clint would go all Robin Hood. Start out as a steadfast yeoman with his smallholding, until he loses everything he loves and goes outlaw. Only after the apocalypse, there’s no Good King Richard to come back and pardon him, so probably he’d die like Spartacus.”

Steve is beginning to feel uneasy. It’s too easy to picture this. “What should we make for dinner?” he asks.

“Do you really think they’d keep mothers’ milk in tanks on their War Rigs?” Bucky asks. “I think it’d spoil.”

“Bucky,” Steve says plaintively.

Bucky looks up at him. Suddenly he crunches upright, so he’s sitting on the couch with his legs against the couch back. “You know we’d never make it to the post-apocalypse,” Bucky says. “We’d be at ground zero trying to stop it when it goes down.” 

“Bucky, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be vaporized in a nuclear blast’ is not actually comforting,” Steve complains.

Bucky rests his forehead briefly against Steve’s. Steve is still for a moment, then reaches for him, hands moving toward Bucky’s shoulders, his hair; but Bucky swings himself off the couch and heads for the kitchen.

“I think we oughta make fried chicken,” Bucky calls, speaking loudly to be heard above the clatter as he digs through their pans. “We gotta get some meat on our bones before the apocalypse comes. Just in case.”


	2. Battleship Potemkin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Bucky and Natasha reminisce about the first times they saw _Battleship Potemkin_.

They’ve scrolled through all of Netflix’s offerings at least twice, or that’s what it feels like, but Bucky and Steve and Natasha still can’t pick a movie. Steve’s not even sure that any of them want to watch a movie, but they don’t want to do anything else either, and at least flicking through Netflix titles is more diverting than staring at the rain on the windowpanes. 

“What about _The Princess Bride_?” Natasha suggests. She’s flopped across the couch, one arm curled around her head, the other resting on her stomach.

“I’ve already seen it,” Bucky says. He’s lying on the floor. “People quote it like it’s the fucking Bible.”

Natasha nods. “On my first mission, all the other kids thought I was a freak because I hadn’t seen _Star Wars_ or _The Princess Bride_ ,” she says. “The Red Room’s supposed to be so elite, and they couldn’t even keep up with current movies. No, it was all _Snow White_ and _Bronenosets Potemkin_.”

“But _Battleship Potemkin_ ’s amazing!” Bucky cries. “We went to a free showing that one time, remember, Steve? When we were kids.” 

“Yeah,” Steve says, and he can’t help smiling too. On the way home they had talked – soberly, naively, with all the seriousness of children – about the injustice of the world, about how to make it better when they got older. “It was inspiring.” 

“It really is,” Natasha says. “After we saw it we went on strike. We wanted more dessert.”

A brief painful silence follows. Bucky twists around on the carpet to look at her. “How’d that go?” he asks.

Natasha rolls her shoulders against the pillow. “They lectured us about appropriating the terms of the workers’ struggle when we were so elite and privileged. Whining for more ice cream like that was the same as a ship’s crew finding maggots in their meat.”

“Christ,” Steve says, and Natasha smiles slightly.

“They had us all crying. By the end of the lecture we all lined up to sign a pledge not to have any dessert for the rest of the year. But my friend Yelena,” Natasha says, and she stretched out her arms, flexing her fingers together, “told me after, even though we’d both signed, that she still wanted more ice cream. And I told her I did too.” 

Another brief silence follows.

“How old were you?” Steve asks finally.

“I’m not sure. Probably nine or ten.”

The rain plashes on the windowpanes. It has been raining all day.

Bucky rolls to his feet. “Let’s go get sundaes,” he says.

And for the first time all afternoon, they all agree. Steve turns off the TV, and they head out into the rain.


	3. Zootopia

“What’s in it for the predators?”

Steve poured himself a glass of orange juice. “Hmmm?”

“This whole Zootopia gig. Why would they ever agree to stop eating the prey animals? What’s in it for them?”

Oh. The movie. Bucky was talking about the movie they’d watched last night. Steve drank some orange juice. “Maybe they liked the vision of living in peace and harmony.”

Bucky snorted. “You can’t eat peace and harmony. And you’d never get all the predators to agree. Did they kill off the dissenters?”

Steve buttered a piece of toast. Trust Bucky to find a hidden genocide in a children’s movie. “The animation’s fantastic,” he said.

Bucky flashed him an irritable look: Steve was missing the point. “I bet there are kidnapping rings providing delicious young rabbits to the predators,” he said. “And the cops don’t care, because they’re all big animals, and the big animals stick together. The whole society’s a scam.”

“That’s sort of the point of the movie,” Steve said. “Zootopia’s not a utopia.”

Bucky crunched down on a piece of toast. “Not a utopia,” he scoffed, disdainful of the understatement. “That city’s going to devour itself if there’s ever a famine.”


	4. The Dark Knight

“Batman,” Bucky pronounces, “is a self-aggrandizing masochistic moron.” 

Fitz sputters with outrage. It takes a few seconds for him to manage to say, “He is not!”

“Is too. He lets Harvey Dent steal all the credit for Batman, and then when Dent turns out to be evil, he lies about it to protect Dent’s image even though Dent is the worst. I think Batman _wants_ to be the focus of a manhunt. It’ll make him feel like a martyr, and he fucking loves that.”

Fitz is speechless with outrage. Skye takes up the torch. “That’s not fair at all,” she protests. “Batman’s trying to protect Gotham City. He needs to preserve Gotham’s hope for a better future – ”

“By lying to them? I guess it would’ve been a good thing if we all pretended Alexander Pierce really was the golden boy everyone believed, then,” Bucky says. 

Fitz and Skye are both briefly silent. “That’s not the same,” Skye ventures. “Harvey Dent went insane after half his face burned off. He wasn’t corrupt from the beginning.” 

“So what?” Bucky says. “He still went off at the end, and that’s where it counts. The people of Gotham would be better off if they stopped waiting for someone else to save them. You can never trust a savior.”


	5. WALL-E

“The ending’s stupid,” Bucky says.

“The people replanting the earth?” Steve says.

“No. Well, yeah, that’s stupid too. They’re just going to fuck it up again, if they don’t all starve to death first.” He’s lying on his side on the couch, curled up around one of the couch pillows. “But before that. When WALL-E’s hard drive gets fried, and EVE sticks in a new one, and then he doesn’t remember EVE or Hello Dolly or anything because she just replaced his entire fucking brain. But then they have him remember everything. It’s such a fucking lie.”

Steve is silent. He’s thinking about Bucky’s returning memories, and Peggy’s memories leaching away. The patients at the Home, who remember too much, too vividly – or nothing at all.

“It would be a dark ending for a children’s movie if he never remembered,” Steve says finally. “I guess they didn’t want to go there.” 

“Then they should have thought of a way to make the plot work without replacing his fucking brain!”

Steve runs his fingertip around the inner rim of the popcorn bowl. He licks the salt off his skin. Finally he suggests, “Maybe it wasn’t his hard drive she replaced.”

“Then why’d he forget everything without it?” Bucky shoots back.

“Well he didn’t, did he? Not for very long. Maybe he just needed some time after he booted up to access his memory again,” Steve argues. It could be true. Who knows how sentient trash-compacting computer robots from the future work?

But Bucky scrunches down in the couch, scowling. “He’s a fucking robot,” Bucky mutters. He punches his pillow into shape. “And he died. They just chickened out, that’s all.”


	6. Dr. Strangelove

Bucky stops chomping on his popcorn as Dr. Strangelove talks. “They made a movie about Zola?” he says.

“I don’t think he’s based on – ”

“SHIELD was supposed to be such a big fat secret back then,” Bucky said. His cheeks flush. “And Howard Stark, that fucking moron, just had to go blab it all out to his Hollywood buddies – ”

“He’s not based on Zola specifically,” Steve interrupts. “It wasn't just SHIELD. The US government hired a bunch of Nazi scientists after the war.”

Bucky rolls over to stare at him. On screen, Dr. Strangelove attempts to rein in his arm as it springs up in a Nazi salute. “Seriously?” Bucky says. 

“Yes.” 

“We fought a war so the US government could hire those Nazi fuckers?” 

“I don’t think that was one of the original war aims – ”

“We fought a war and they saw all the shit the Nazis did and _then_ they decided to hire them?” 

“I know,” Steve sighs. “I know.”


	7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The credits have barely started rolling when Bucky says, “What a mushy load of crap.”

Steve whisks up the popcorn bowl and takes it to the kitchen, mostly so he can wipe away the moisture from his eyes. But Bucky’s complaints follow him: “A couple of idiots erase their memories of each other, except one of them gets cold feet and somehow telepathically communicates with his former girlfriend – how the fuck does that work? The world-building in this movie sucks. They meet on the train the next day, and – ”

“ – fall in love again even though they don’t remember each other.” Steve thought it was sweet.

“ – start the whole fucking cycle all over again,” Bucky says. “Even though it’s going to be a trainwreck again, because neither of them has changed at all.”

Steve rinses out the empty popcorn bowl. He sets it on the draining board. “Maybe,” he suggests, returning to the living room, “they’d rather be a trainwreck together than live peacefully apart.”

Bucky snorts. “Clementine could do way better than that boring-ass loser. And it’s so stupid, anyway. I don’t believe for a second they’d fall in love a second time if they didn’t remember each other at all.”

Steve’s stomach tenses. “You don’t?”

“Fuck no. If you met me today, you’d want to dropkick me into next week.”

“I would not.”

Bucky snorts again. But he doesn’t enlarge on this theory, just picks at a hole in his cargo pants. Maybe he’s right, maybe Steve wouldn’t fall for Bucky if he met Bucky today; but if he’d never known Bucky, Steve’s not at all sure what kind of person he’d be today. 

If he’d even be alive today. “I would’ve died of pneumonia that first winter after my mother died,” Steve says. “If I hadn’t known you. You carried me back to your apartment, remember? It was snowing, and your mom put me to bed.”

“You’d’ve had someone else to take care of you.”

But Steve shakes his head. His throat is closing up; he’s not sure if it’s leftover sadness from the movie or the memory of struggling to breathe while he had pneumonia, or what. “I didn’t,” he says. “It was always just you. You and your family.”

Bucky doesn’t reply. He unsnaps the fastener on a pocket and snaps it again, and then slides over on his side, his head in Steve’s lap. “Like anyone would waste mind-wiping tech erasing losers’ bad romantic memories, anyway,” Bucky mutters. “Like Joel and Clementine could pay enough money to make that worth anyone’s while. Lacuna would sell that shit to the military.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've got a movie you'd like me to do, drop me an ask on my [tumblr](https://ospreyarcher.tumblr.com/)!


	8. The Land Before Time

“It’s one of my favorite movies,” says Skye. She’s clutching the DVD to her, tense fingers half-obscuring the cartoon dinosaurs on the front. “I watched it over and over at one of my best foster homes. So be nice about it.”

“I’m always nice about your movies,” Bucky protests.

“That’s only true if you have literally no idea what nice means,” Skye shoots back.

Fine then. He’ll keep his mouth shut. He will not make fun even if the dinosaurs sing or dance or do whatever other dumb thing they’re going to do. Is this the movie that Barney comes from? He’s a purple dinosaur, and so’s that brontosaur on the cover.

That brontosaur turns out to be Littlefoot. His mother dies about five minutes into the movie, leaving Littlefoot all alone to face the giant hostile world all on his own with no one to take care of him. Bucky chews on the cuff of his hoodie.

The cuff has holes in it by the time they reach the end. Skye watches starry-eyed as Littlefoot and his eclectic band of diverse dinosaur friends dash joyfully into the golden, unreal glow of the Great Valley, an oasis of peace and prosperity in a brutal dying world. “Did you like it?” she asks.

“Yes,” says Bucky, because that’s what she wants to hear.

She looks at him, expectant, hopeful.

“It’s sad,” Bucky mutters. 

“No it’s not!” Skye protests. “Littlefoot and his friends all work together to defeat the evil Sharptooth, and then they find the Great Valley where there’s plenty to eat and Littlefoot reunites with his grandparents!”

“The Great Valley,” Bucky says. “Right.” He bites down on his hoodie cuff, but he can’t help himself. “It’s a metaphor for dying,” he bursts out. “Littlefoot followed his dead mother there and everything.”

“Bucky! No!” Skye yells, and stares at him, appalled. Then her face smoothes. She’s found a hole in his interpretation. “If it was, then his mom would be there, right?”

“I guess.” Bucky’s almost sorry. If Littlefoot were dead, his suffering would be over.

The Great Valley can’t last long, after all: not when every dinosaur in the land has to be searching for it. There’s a siege coming, or a famine. 

“There are sequels,” Skye says. “But they suck.”

“Of course they do,” Bucky says. “Of course.”


	9. The Secret of Kells

Steve’s glad he gave into Bucky’s insistence that he should leave his cabin to watch _The Secret of Kells_. It’s kind of fun, lying on the floor with Bucky and Skye, eating popcorn and soda bread (Skye thought it would be thematically appropriate), and watching the movie. The animation is gorgeous, the forest especially; Steve wants to get lost in it.

Then Bucky pipes up. “These monks are fucking morons.” 

“Bucky! Hush!” Skye waves a wrathful hand at him. Bucky shoves a handful of popcorn into his mouth and, miraculously, hushes.

For about fifteen minutes. Then he pops up again. “Why are they all treating the abbot like an idiot for wanting to build a wall around their abbey? Of course they need to focus on finishing their fucking wall! Or else the Vikings are going to come and kill them all and burn all their precious fucking books!”

“Bucky!” Skye shrieks, and hurls a pillow at him.

Bucky doesn’t say anything when the Vikings burn down the monastery. He does cast a glance at Steve, though, victorious, and his smirk grows small and bitter when Brendan shows up at the end with his completed Book of Kells.

“Like one leftover book means anything,” Bucky mutters. “Maybe they’d have more than one goddamn book if they’d finished the goddamn wall.”


	10. The Matrix

“Could hooking humans up to the power grid generate enough energy to power a robot apocalypse?” Bucky asks. 

Simmons is watering a set of tiny plants that she keeps on board the Bus – some sort of experiment, although Bucky didn’t understand it when she explained – and doesn’t answer right away. He would ask again, but he doesn’t want it to sound like he’s worrying about it or anything. 

And anyway, Simmons brushes a lock of hair off her face and says, “No, I should think not. _The Matrix_ is an interesting philosophical thought experiment of course, but on a purely scientific level it doesn’t quite hang together.” 

Bucky relaxes back into the office chair crammed into the corner of the lab. Simmons, tiny plant watering complete, moves on to peer at a shattered chunk of an alien artifact. 

“I guess if it’d work,” Bucky muses, “we’d have poor people hooked up to generators already.” 

Simmons is peering through a jeweler’s glass. “What a dreadful thought,” she murmurs. “Calipers?”

Bucky puts them in her hand. “Running that big complicated illusion would take more energy than they’d be able to suck out of humans in the first place, probably,” he says hopefully. “It’d be much better for the robots just to kill the humans off and get their energy somewhere else. Then they wouldn’t have to worry about a rebellion.” 

“Mmmm,” Simmons says. “Dental pick?”

Bucky selects the smallest one. That’s usually the one she wants. “I don’t think there’d be much of a rebellion anyway,” he says. “I bet everyone would take the blue pill. Choose peace and comfort and lies.”

“Do you think so?” Simmons says, her attention caught at last. “I don’t believe everyone would. There will always be a small group who would choose to pursue the truth at all costs.”

“Like SHIELD, you mean?”

Simmons doesn’t hear any irony in it. “Very much so,” she says. 

Bucky hands her a small brush. She sweeps the dust off the artifact and picks away at the dirt encrustations. Bucky sits back, and watches, and doesn’t say that he thinks the red pill just tells different lies.


	11. Beauty and the Beast

They stay through the fancy credits (why do modern movies have such fancy credits?) before they leave the theater. The lobby is empty, the sky dark; the street lights shimmer on the puddles as they walk into the misty night. “Do you think people really change?” Bucky asks.

Steve cannot repress an incredulous stare. 

“For the better, I mean,” Bucky clarifies. “People change for the worse all the time.” He stretches, his spine cracking. “Maybe the Victorians were right,” he muses. “About childhood being a time of purity and innocence and then you grow up and it just gets worse.”

“Bucky,” Steve says. “Children are awful.” They tangled with enough schoolyard bullies in their time that Bucky ought to know that.

“Sure. But they just get worse later on. It’s not the kids getting the torches and pitchforks to storm the Beast’s castle.”

Only because they don’t have the arm strength, Steve thinks. But he doesn’t say it. It feels weird to be the cynical one in a conversation with Bucky. 

“But seriously,’ Bucky says. “Do you think people can change on purpose? Not just be changed by love or shit, but change themselves.”

“You did,” Steve says.

“I dunno,” Bucky says. He walks through a puddle rather than going around. “I think maybe that was your fault.” 

“Maybe you’re not giving yourself enough credit,” Steve counters.

Bucky tosses a crumpled napkin at him. Steve catches it and tosses it in a trash can. “The Beast started changing before Belle fell in love with him,” he says. “Maybe her love made him feel like it was worthwhile to keep it up.” 

“Maybe,” Bucky agrees. His mouth twitches up at the corners. “Well, of course it did. Anybody’d give change a try if they had Emma Watson on the other side.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last one of these that I have written right now. If there are other movies you'd like to see, send me an ask over on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ospreyarcher).


	12. The Mummy

“Do you ever wonder if we’re actually alive?” Bucky asks.

Steve pauses _The Mummy_. The screen freezes on a shot of Boris Karloff’s sunken, hypnotic eyes.

“What – ” Steve begins, and then decides he doesn’t want Bucky to clarify. It’s been a shitty day and all Steve wanted was a nice nostalgic movie night watching _The Mummy_ , which they saw three times back when it came out in 1932. “I’m going to make more popcorn,” Steve says. “You want some?” 

Bucky rolls his eyes at this attempt at misdirection. “Look at Ardeth Bey,” he says, gesturing at the TV screen with his beer bottle. “He looks like he’s alive, he’s wandering around walking and talking, but really he’s dead the whole time. You ever think we might be like that?”

Steve has not, in fact, thought about that. “No,” he says firmly.

“We’d make a classic thirties horror movie,” Bucky says. He leans back on the couch, stretching his arms above his head, gazing up at the ceiling. “Stuck in suspended animation, brought back to life long after we oughta be gone, plotting our undead reign of terror with our unspeakable powers.”

Steve sits, frozen. The cold is seeping into his bones. 

“You can feel it, can’t you?” Bucky says. He turns his head, searching Steve’s face. “Or can’t feel it. You can’t feel things the way you used to. Can you?”

Steve explodes out of the couch. “I’m making more popcorn,” he says. “You want some?”

“Obviously,” said Bucky.

Steve still pops corn the old-fashioned way, in a pan on the stovetop. The smell of hot oil and the rat-a-tat-tat of the pops are so sane and plain and normal that the cold begins to lift.

At least, till Bucky says, “Maybe that’s why they’ve never recreated the serum.”

He’s come into the kitchen; he can move absolutely silently when he wants. He's leaning against the kitchen wall, arms crossed. 

The popcorn continues to pop. The force of the kernels vibrates the lid beneath Steve’s hand.

“If it’s just science, you’d think Howard Stark could’ve done it,” Bucky goes on. “But if the secret ingredient’s an ancient Egyptian scroll - he’d never think to try that. And probably it’s lost in a Hydra vault somewhere. Or at the bottom of the sea with Red Skull. The cold and the weight of the water have pressed it down, and kept it together.”

The popcorn has stopped popping. The kitchen smells like burning.

“But someday,” Bucky says, “a sea slug’ll slither over it. It will come to pieces in the water, and no one will ever know why, but we’ll crumble into dust.”


	13. Kingsman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for all of _Kingsman: The Secret Service_ ahoy!

Bucky and Natasha like to make fun of spy movies. Steve doesn’t quite get the appeal, but then, as Bucky points out, “You’d be a shitty spy, Steve. You'd hate the lying.”

“I can lie,” Steve objects. "I'm a great liar." 

“Long-term? While you stand there and watch people die?”

So Steve lets them get on with it. They’ve got _Kingsman: The Secret Service_ today, and it feels like he’s spent half the movie in the kitchen making batch after batch of popcorn, because they toss handfuls of the stuff at the screen whenever the camera lingers a trifle too lovingly on an umbrella, tailored suit, or other piece of upper class English paraphernalia. "This is base capitalist propaganda," Bucky scoffs. 

"They haven't even risen to the capitalist stage yet," Natasha objects. "They're stuck in feudalism. _Kingsman_. Bowler hat!" 

A rain of popcorn obscures the screen as Colin Firth beats up a bunch of working-class toughs in a bar.

"Thank God we've got Colin Firth to protect us from the uppity proletariat," Bucky says. "If only they all knew their place like Eggy's dad. Laid down his life for his betters."

They're having a good time mocking the movie. Steve is the one who actually cracks.

It's the dog scene that breaks him. For Eggsy's last test before he can become a Kingsman, he's ordered to shoot his pet dog. He refuses, of course, and Steve almost sighs at the cliche: of course the hero can't shoot a dog. And naturally, he has to fail the last test in order to pass it. They want to make sure he's not a blindly obedient henchman before they make him a Kingsman. 

Except - Steve's incredulity rises as the film continues - the other characters continue to treat Eggsy like he actually failed. Like he really _was_ meant to shoot that dog. Steve can't believe it, then refuses to believe it, and his disbelief cracks into rage when Eggsy's mentor scolds him for not shooting his dog like he was supposed to.

"What the hell kind of test is that?" Steve shouts. 

Steve can't see Bucky and Natasha's faces from where he's standing. But Bucky’s shoulders are as expressive as an eyeroll as he pauses the film. “What’d you expect?”

“That he’d pass the test by refusing to shoot the dog,” Steve says. “What kind of spy agency – ”

“All spy agencies,” Natasha cuts him off. “All spy agencies want blindly obedient puppets.”

“Then all of them are evil,” Steve says.

"News at eleven," Bucky says. He's turned to face Steve, and now he really does roll his eyes. “How about you walk off some steam by going to the pizza place for us?”

Steve does go to the pizza place, mostly to get away from the movie. The walk does not make him noticeably less furious.

Natasha is a good spy. She stays to eat pizza with them, and leaves maybe a little more quickly than normal, but smiling and joking all the time so Steve doesn’t notice anything’s wrong.

But after she goes, Bucky smacks Steve on the back of the head, not quite gently. “Hey, dumbass, what kind of graduation test do you think the Red Room used?”

And just like that Steve knows. He feels like an amoeba. “Oh,” he says.

“Don’t feel too bad,” Bucky says. His tone drips with false comfort. “I’m sure it wasn’t _dogs_ the Red Room ordered their students to shoot.”


End file.
